Bitcoin IRA: How to Save for Retirement Using Cryptocurrency

DucationTechnology has revolutionized the way we manage our savings and retirement accounts. Until recently, cryptocurrency was considered too volatile for inclusion in individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Though still plenty volatile, cryptocurrency is now considered too good to pass up. Suddenly, a bitcoin-based retirement account doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

Bitcoin IRA: An Introduction

The bitcoin IRA falls under a much broader umbrella of digital IRAs that are becoming increasingly popular in American investment circles. Digital IRAs are also part of a broader category of self-directed retirement accounts investors can use to maximize their exposure to alternative assets.

A digital IRA – the kind that holds bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos – is a self-directed retirement account. Since cryptocurrencies are recognized as property by the IRS, they can be held as investments inside an IRA account. Access to a bigger pool of investments is one of the chief differentiators of the self-directed IRA. In addition to cryptocurrencies, self-directed IRAs offer exposure to real estate, precious metals and a host of other assets. Of course, they can also be used to invest in traditional stocks and bonds.

Self-directed IRAs can also help investors maximize their crypto holdings by offering unique tax advantages that otherwise couldn’t be realized had they purchased them through an exchange. By keeping your bitcoin inside an IRA, you won’t face any tax penalties on investment returns. Of course, this no longer applies when you take the funds out.

Naturally, there are plenty of misconceptions around bitcoin-based retirement accounts. Hacked.com recently connected with Jay Blaskey, digital currency specialist at BitIRA, to clear the air.

Common Digital IRA Misconceptions

Blaskey says there are at least five core misconceptions currently plaguing the market for digital IRAs. Investors should weigh these carefully before deciding to embark on a bitcoin-driven retirement account. More importantly, they should steer clear of bogus claims issued by investment managers.

Here are, in Blaskey’s own words, the five common misconceptions surrounding digital IRAs.

1. “A Bitcoin IRA from company X is unique in that it is fully IRS compliant.”

No company can claim that it has a unique offering simply because it offers a Bitcoin IRA that is IRS compliant. In reality, this is a capability that a small number of companies, including BitIRA, currently offer. In order for a Bitcoin IRA to be IRS compliant, you simply must ensure that you have set up a self-directed IRA with a qualified custodian and that you adhere to the rules of purchasing and storing your assets, so that you don’t run afoul of any IRS regulations.

2. “Company Y recently introduced a Bitcoin IRA which allows investors to roll over an existing IRA or 401(k) into a Bitcoin IRA.”

While this can oftentimes be correct, statements like this from some companies make it sound as though any IRA or 401(k) can be moved to a Bitcoin IRA. However, that is not always the case. For example, if you opened your 401(k) with your current employer, you likely cannot move it to a Bitcoin IRA. One exception is that those who are 59 1/2 years or older may be able to make this move without any penalties. The rules can be complex in some cases, so we often refer our customers to their accountants to fully understand their personal situation.

3. “You should set up an LLC to start a self-directed IRA.”

You don’t need to. It is possible to do it this way, but it will probably be a much more time consuming and complicated solution than going with a company like BitIRA, which does all of the paperwork administration that is required for you. Also if any mistakes are made in the setting up or annual filing, later auditing by the IRS could deem that you made a distribution. In such an event, you would be exposed to negative taxable events along with fines and penalties.

4. What are the rules and fees in place for self-directed IRAs, ie, maximum annual contribution of $5,500, requirement of a custodian, etc.

In terms of functionality, Digital IRAs have the same rules as any other IRA, with the same maximums and custodian rules. In addition, you can set up your Digital IRA as any other IRA – whether it be Traditional, Roth, SEP or SIMPLE.

5. “In order to open a Digital IRA, you must place all of your retirement savings in cryptocurrencies.”

You do NOT need to do this. A Digital IRA is simply a descriptive name for an IRA that contains some portion of digital currencies in your IRA. It falls under the umbrella of a self-directed IRA, which allows for a broad range of investment options within your IRA. Therefore, you can choose the allocation of digital currencies that you’re most comfortable with.

Ways Forward

The cryptocurrency market is maturing at a rapid rate, with bitcoin and a handful of altcoins offering the biggest investment appeal. Cryptocurrency regulations have struggled to keep pace with the evolution of the market, but investors are generally in the clear when it comes to generating retirement savings via digital assets. In the United States, bitcoin is recognized as a commodity, making it

Although IRAs are only relevant from the perspective of U.S. investors, cryptocurrencies have clearly entered the discussion on retirement savings. Before integrating cryptocurrency into your retirement portfolio, it’s important that you get up to speed on all the regulations concerning digital assets in your jurisdiction.

Disclaimer: The author owns bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. He holds investment positions in the coins, but does not engage in short-term or day-trading.

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Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink.

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4.7 stars on average, based on 743 rated postsSam Bourgi is Chief Editor to Hacked.com, where he leads content development for one of the world's foremost cryptocurrency resources. Over the past eight years Sam has authored more than 10,000 articles and over 40 whitepapers in the fields of labor market economics, emerging technologies, cryptocurrency and traditional finance. Sam's work has been featured in and cited by some of the world's leading newscasts, including Barron's, CBOE and Forbes.
Contact: sam@hacked.com
Twitter: @hsbourgi

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How Do BTC Transactions Actually Work?

The advent of bitcoin has revolutionized the payment arena by removing centralized systems and the need for expensive and often convoluted intermediaries. To illustrate, let’s take a look at payments via traditional centralized systems and contrast them to bitcoin.

Centralized Payments

Payments via traditional finance channels are done though the help of intermediaries (financial institutions with certain roles and level of trust).

What are the features of such a system? In short:

reversible transactions

intermediaries take a percentage, which increases the cost of transactions and sets their minimum price, making it impractical to carry out infrequent and small transactions

the reversibility of transactions increases the cost of services whose services are irrevocable (the transaction was canceled. but we have already paid% of it)

since the payment can be canceled, the seller is insured, requiring more information from the buyer than is necessary

a certain percentage of fraud is inevitable

But what if there would be a payment system that allows any two participants to transfer funds directly, without an intermediary? The computational cost of canceling transactions will make fraud unprofitable, and escrow mechanisms will protect customers.

This is exactly what does Bitcoin based on the blockchain technology.

How Does it Work?

Information (block info, counter, and list of transactions) is recorded in blocks. When a block (its size is up to 1 MB) is full, a new block appears. The blocks are interconnected linearly, one after another in order, and each block contains information (hash) about the previous one. Therefore, if you wish, you can see the story down to the very first block.

We define electronic coin as a sequence of digital signatures. Person A sends the coin to person B, signing the hash of the previous transaction and Person B’s public key, attaching this information to the coin. However, how does Person B determine how many times Person A spent this coin? He should know that none of the previous owners signed the transaction before the one that is in the chain of the coin sent to him. For this, a time stamp is written in the block hash. It shows that at the moment specific data existed and therefore fell into the block hash. It turns out that only the first transaction is valid, so you can not worry about late attempts at double spending, the information about the first transaction was already there and, since it is recorded for all system participants, the false (later) will be rejected.

From the user’s side, the operation looks like this: Person A opens his wallet, enters the recipient’s address and the amount of 2.5 (for example) Bitcoin, executes the signature using the private key (the public key or bitcoin address is a unique personal address that is used in the chain, and everyone can see it, and the private key works as a password).

Inside the system, a transaction will have three pieces of information:

Input. Record with details about where Person A has bitcoins.

Amount. The number of transferred coins. In this case, 2.5 BTC.

Output. Person B bitcoin wallet address.

Input and Output

As you probably understand, Bitcoins exist only in the form of transaction records in the electronic repository. For example, Person A’s balance consists of 1 BTC from Person C, and 3 BTC from Person D. All these are different transactions that were carried out at different times. In Person A’s wallet, the records do not merge into a single file with 4 BTC but continue to be stored separately.

For Person A to send Person B 2.5 BTC, the repository is trying to find a file with such a sum or combination of data to make 2.5 BTC. In our example, there is no operation with such amount, and they are not cumulative to get the required amount. Person A cannot break 3 BTC received from Person D (the sum of the input) since the system does not allow such division. Therefore, Person A has to send 3 BTC instead of 2.5 (output amount) for two transactions or two outputs: 2.5 BTC for Person B and 0.5 BTC back in the form of change. Of course, the user won’t see the difference and this is just a way of explaining how this works overall.

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Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink.

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4.9 stars on average, based on 42 rated postsVladislav Semjonov has a legal and financial background. He has been involved in crypto space since early 2017 in both ICO advising positions in several ICO consultancy firms, and as an ICO analyst for VC. He began contributing for Hacked.com in April 2017.

What is a Smart Contract? Here are Practical Examples

Even though there are very few newcomers to the crypto market now, I will provide some useful information on smart contracts even for those who have been investing in digital assets for a long time. After all, we all have knowledge gaps, and many definitions are very vague – especially as it pertains to blockchain and smart contracts.

What is a Smart Contract, Anyway?

A smart contract is a program that starts the execution of a specified result only when pre-specified conditions are met. In other words:

The parties have determined the conditions and the result of their execution.

When requirements are met, the smart contract will be automatically executed. This can be either the transfer of assets from one side to the other or the launching of a chain of any operations sequence.

The principle and most apparent advantages of this technology are the elimination of intermediaries and the resolution of the issue of trust which is an achievement of technological trust.

The first and most straightforward application of such a contract is multi-signature contract (i.e., multisig, escrow). Those parties who do not trust one another can freeze a certain amount of assets in the blockchain in such a way that, in order to spend them, a contract would require signatures of more than 50% of stakeholders.

Example 1

The contract execution mechanism is visible in the following example:

Suppose there is a contract for saving money initiated by parents for their children to use when they reach adulthood. Contributions can be made to the account, where funds can be returned strictly after 18 years. This contract accepts transactions, transfers money from the parent’s account and checks the timeline for a specified date (like 18 years). If it does, it transfers money to the child’s account. Miners, seeing the code of this contract, will execute it. If you do not need to do anything, then the state of the account will not change, and no transactions need to be performed. However, as soon as 18 years have passed, the miner will execute the contract code and receive a transaction returning the money to the child’s account – and write it in the blockchain. To avoid contracts that take money from accounts or DoS clients in endless cycles, each instruction of the contract costs a bit of a different currency (i.e., gas), which has a price in the currency of the network. Therefore, the execution of a contract requires money that goes to those who execute them and close the blocks (i.e., to miners themselves).

Example 2

The second example:

Another type of contract could be one that accepts bets on the bitcoin price on a specific date and then transfers the money to the winning party based on the result. How does a contract know a bitcoin rate when the time comes? After all, can’t the data be changed and faked?

Such problems can be solved with Oracles. An oracle is a conductor program that transfers information from external data sources to the blockchain, providing the necessary data to execute smart contracts. For example, an oracle can tracks stock quotes on the external web and transfer these data to the blockchain.

Now smart contracts are widely used in the field of fundraising, such as in initial coin offerings (ICOs). As many investors know, ICOs have made their presence felt on many industries, such as financial markets (banking services, insurance, derivatives trading), supply chain management and logistics, accounting and auditing, registration of property rights, all sorts of voting, smart transport, digital identity identification and many, many others.

Unconditional advantages of smart contract technology are, of course, savings (due to the absence of intermediaries); immutability (since the prescribed terms of the contract are stored in a distributed registry, and no one can change them) and speed (when conditions are met, the process starts instantly).

The most apparent shortcomings are the susceptibility to bugs and the complexity of writing. Besides, the exchange of confidential data through transparent distributed registries is not suitable for many banks and large corporations. Also, problems of scaling and speed of transaction processing are still relevant.

However, overall, a smart contract is a significant breakthrough and a foundation of broader applications of blockchain technology. Smart contracts have proliferated the market via ICOs but their applicability extends far beyond that. Only time will tell if smart contracts disrupt other core areas of the economy.

Disclaimer: The author owns bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. He holds investment positions in the coins, but does not engage in short-term or day-trading.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink.

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4.9 stars on average, based on 42 rated postsVladislav Semjonov has a legal and financial background. He has been involved in crypto space since early 2017 in both ICO advising positions in several ICO consultancy firms, and as an ICO analyst for VC. He began contributing for Hacked.com in April 2017.

Crypto Kingmakers: Evaluating Exchange Listings

Cryptocurrency exchanges have long been considered potential ‘kingmakers’ for up and coming ICO projects both pre and post launch of crowd-funding rounds owing to reputation, trading volume and community value, as well as prior experience of shrewd coin selection.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are (at a base level) responsible for fostering liquidity in the market whilst providing competitive choices for investment consumers in the market: both with regards to the exchanges themselves as well as the diversity of the coins they offer for trade.

Separating the Kings from Pretenders

Whilst data shows an overall increase in investment volume for new ventures, it also shows a significant failure ratio within these same figures. In fact, data published by tracking agency ‘ICORating’ suggests that a majority (55%) of these initial coin offerings have failed within just the second quarter of this current year.

Potential reasons for this include a ‘bubble’ effect resulting from the artificial inflation of token prices which in actuality hold little to no real value, inability to acquire funding or meet expectations, and the difficulty of gaining attention and penetrating a highly competitive space.

Considering the reported failure rate of ICOs at present, it would be reasonable to exercise caution when considering investment in any of the influx of new tokens on the market (no doubt exacerbated by recent decisions made by Coinbase).

A Utilitarian Perspective

This writer reccommends that you apply critical thinking, solicit the advice of experts and knowledgeable friends, do your own research and cross-reference it with those of pundits and your peers, and do not let anybody encourage you to make any premature decisions. This is all simple advice easily taken for granted, but timeless nonetheless.

If a coin has no real actionable purpose, inexperienced leadership, technical fallacies, poor communication, or any combination of the above plus more – then there is a good chance that said coin holds no real value, beyond they professed by its proponents.

Looking at Trends

We can’t predict the future, however there are some observable indicators and trends which could point towards the next coins to be chosen by top platforms.

After the PR nightmare surrounding Tether of late, there has been something of a rush of new contenders attempting to become the next stable-coin (a fixed-value token used for off-setting bear markets, or to be used as an intermediary. One of the most talked about of these is the Winklevoss twins’ ‘Gemini Token’.

Adjacent to the ‘Gemini Token’ is the unique investment orientated token from BitMart exchange entitled the ‘BMX Token’. Like a stable coin it can be used as an intermediary for exchanges with other forms of cryptocurrency, however it has the added benefits of affording token-holders discount on all on-platform transactions in addition to being able to stake these coins towards potential new coin listings in the future.

I have also frequently borderline evangelised Terra Virtua on this site and beyond.

As a disclaimer I have no holdings or stake in any of the above companies or tokens. Additionally, I possess a small and transient amount of Bitcoin.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink.

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Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this.Loading...

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Hacked.com and its team members have pledged to reject any form of advertisement or sponsorships from 3rd parties. We will always be neutral and we strive towards a fully unbiased view on all topics. Whenever an author has a conflicting interest, that should be clearly stated in the post itself with a disclaimer. If you suspect that one of our team members are biased, please notify me immediately at jonas.borchgrevink(at)hacked.com.